The Turtle Moves! Read Free

Great T’phon, and Jerakeen.
    We’ll get back to them in a moment, but first a word about prologues to fantasy novels.
    I’ve been writing fantasy for about thirty years now, and reading it for much longer. I’ve taught workshops for would-be fantasy writers, and judged contests. I’ve seen a lot of fantasy, good and bad, and I long ago came to a conclusion: Fantasy prologues are pretty much always a bad idea.
    Fantasy novels often have them anyway , of course, introducing the reader to some of the characters and establishing a lot of the background details that are too boring to waste actual story time on. I’ve certainly written a few of them myself. When you’ve just got to explain the prophecy your hero is going to fulfill though none of the characters are going to mention it for thirty or forty chapters, or you really want the reader to know where the magic sword is hidden so he can appreciate the suspense as our heroes finally get close to it, you just explain it all in a prologue. It seems so simple. Classier than footnotes, 39 and preferable to stopping the action later to say, “By the way, there’s this ancient story our heroes haven’t heard yet . . .”

    But generally, they’re clunky. A good prologue is a rare thing. Mostly, not to put too fine a point on it, they suck.
    And the prologue to the Colour of Magic . . . well, it’s troublesome. One might almost suspect it of being a deliberate parody of a prologue. One might , if one were suspicious that way. One might suppose that Mr. Pratchett had himself noticed that fantasy-novel prologues tend to be less a good storytelling device and more a way of showing off all the spiffy world-building the author has done. Yes, one might.
    Or one might remember that Mr. Pratchett was a young and inexperienced writer at the time, who might not have realized yet that prologues are usually a bad idea.
    But let us move on to look at what the Prologue tells us. It introduces us to five characters by name, but they aren’t the heroes of the story, nor the villains. They aren’t even human. They have no dialogue, and do not participate directly in the story. They are, as you might say, in an unusually literal sense, the supporting cast.
    They have cool names, though. Good fantasy names. Berilia, Tubul, Jerakeen—lovely fantasy-world names.
    Great T’phon, though—is there a Lesser T’phon somewhere? If not, how come he gets a “Great” while the other three do not? Great A’tuin, sure, the turtle’s the base on which everything stands, so putting a “Great” in there seems perfectly reasonable, but why does T’phon get one, while Jerakeen, Tubul, and Berilia do not?
    Either T’phon’s got a better PR guy, or there really is a Lesser T’phon somewhere. Or there was once—many, many volumes later we are told that there had once been a fifth elephant. Maybe that was Lesser T’phon. Maybe he was the runt of the litter, which is how he lost his footing and fell off.
    Or not. Maybe “Great T’phon” just sounded cool.
    But that’s another thing—who named these guys? How does anyone know their names?
    I suppose it’s magic. Or the gods told someone.
    At any rate, we are introduced to the Discworld in a surprisingly literal fashion, not by meeting our protagonists or our villains, but by meeting the five beings upon whose backs the entire world rests.
    Typical of Mr. Pratchett, that, being cleverly literal. He’s good at that sort of thing, and that’s on display right from the start, what with the awe-inspiring descriptions of the turtle and the elephants who, one has a suspicion, were really intended in the original myths to be metaphysical
concepts, or perhaps metaphors of some sort, rather than literal animals with meteor scars and hydrogen frost. One doesn’t expect to see words like “meteor” and “hydrogen”